Provisional paintings are those that might appear unfinished or incomplete; that court intentional awkwardness, physical fragility and instability; that reject the display of conventional skills; that discover beauty in the most unassuming materials; that sometimes grapple with painting’s ‘impossibility’. Their lineage includes Joan Miró’s anti-paintings of circa 1930, Giacometti’s endless obliterations and restartings of his painted portraits, the early work of Sigmar Polke, and the spray-painted abstractions of Martin Barré. The theoretical underpinnings range from Samuel Beckett to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

Raoul De Keyser’s concise exposition of painterly ambiguity of image and form is, as so often with this artist, a seemingly casual composition that rewards close, careful attention. Pinning passages of messy sfumato upon stray advertising layouts, Albert Oehlen deposes the medium, sneaks up on grand painting before it can be frozen as a mere masterpiece. For Michael Krebber, no aspect of the medium is taken for granted as the canvas becomes a kind of sublime flypaper, fixing individual gesture and media grabs.

Several painters investigate alternatives to the paintbrush: for Angiola Gatti, the preferred tool is a humble ballpoint pen employed to carve out collapsing spaces; Cheryl Donegan wields a knife to slice into glittering metallic tape in her shredded, stuttering paintings. Peter Soriano’s conceptual wall pieces track their own making, reflecting on the artist’s every decision and
how it might have gone differently. If Sergej Jensen refrains from cluttering his stretched fabrics with even a single stroke, Jacqueline Humphries goes to the other extreme, ceaselessly adding to and obliterating her suspended calligraphy. Richard Aldrich, who insists that for him painting is the opposite of ‘impossible’, offers four isolated images using four distinct techniques and four representational languages: the syntax of looking we use to reconcile them leaves meaning itself provisional.

Provisional painting is not about making ‘last paintings’, nor is it about the deconstruction of the medium. What the various works in the show share is neither style nor content, neither techniques nor materials, but rather a profound willingness to suspend closure, to leave painting open. Like Roland Barthes’ ‘Neutral’, they outplay the paradigm of their medium, and continually baffle it.